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×Also suggested: print and pack a few longreads that you’ve recently read and enjoyed and want to share with your family.

× On the way to the airport, you’re unexpectedly charmed by the idea of this trip.

× Following a series of delayed flights, bad food, and interrupted sleep, spotting your parent’s face at the airport in Mumbai, shouting your name from a crowd, feels like a hallucination.

× A hallucination immediately made real by comments on how tired you look.

× Or how thin your face has become.

× Or how your jacket sleeve has a hole.

× It takes a couple days, give or take, for parents to adjust to being around their kids who are no longer kids.

× Stuff gets said that isn’t meant to hurt.

× More often than not a parent forgets that you exist in a world where you work and pay rent, and get angry and sad, and have your heart broken and mended, broken and mended.

× Still, that initial hug will briefly dissolve all that currently feels unwieldy in your life.

× You will spend the rest of the vacation dodging all topics related to what is feeling unwieldy in your life.

× Avoid deflecting to your sibling’s life.

× Just dodge.

× Dodge. Dodge. Dodge.

× Until that one afternoon, a very sunny one where your skin feels warmed from within and everyone is off doing his or her thing, and you suddenly feel compelled to put down your book and talk to someone.

× Less the actual conversation, but the desire to speak candidly and kindly, is the vacation’s sweet spot.

× Similar examples: Drinks at the hotel bar with your brother on your father’s tab. A wedding reception at the hotel keeps you both distracted enough to not get on each other’s nerves.

× Or, watching as a parent delights in a snack he or she hasn’t delighted in in years.

× Better yet; if you find the snack particular gross.

× And a personal favorite: The four of you walking in a narrow line. (The market was too crowded and loud to walk and talk side by side.)

× Inevitably, when a family is forced to walk in a line, the eldest member always appears the youngest.

× At a spice plantation, biting into a peppercorn and burning your tongue, you are more present than you have been in a very long time.

× Parents look older the more present one feels.

× But their happiness looks freer too.

× E-mailing a friend frequently — as frequently as possible that is — is essential.

× But just one friend.

× Choose someone who won’t expect elaborate details about the trip, but a continued conversation from before you left.

× E-mails concerning the vacation, unless funny, are rarely enjoyable to read or to write.

× Choose a friend who you’ve recently felt emotionally near to.

× One that your parents do not know or have the knowledge to ask about.

× These emails will feel secret and with ten hours separating the two of you, your good mornings will be her good nights. Her insomnia will feel like company.

× She will be, for the next two weeks, that side of you which is witness to yourself. An orbit.

× Long car rides through windy mountaintop roads in Kerala will make you devastatingly nauseous.

× Nausea is the most regressive sensation, ever. All you want is parents, and luckily, they are there!

× Offering to sit in the middle is both a literal and figurative way of hoping to take up the least amount of space.

Durga Chew-Bose is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about The Mindy Project.